Virtualization

What happens in Vegas gets blogged

Devin L. Ganger — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 23:46:00 GMT

Update (11/15/08 1240PST): Fixed the URLs in the links to point to the actual decks. Sorry!

Time this year has flown! Hard to believe that I've just finished up my last conference for the year -- Exchange Connections Fall at the fabulous Mandalay Bay resort and conference center in Las Vegas. This was my second trip to Vegas this year (the first was in May for the Exchange/DPM session at MMS), and I really prefer the city in November: far fewer people, much more pleasant temperatures.

I gave the following three sessions yesterday:

(EXC16) The Collaboration Blender -- This session is adapted from the Outlook and SharePoint: Playing Well Together article I wrote for Windows IT Pro magazine (subscription required). Exchange and SharePoint are both touted as collaboration solutions and have some overlapping functionality, so this session explores some of the overlaps and compares and contrasts what each is good for. (In other words, we spend a lot of time talking about Exchange public folders.) And where does Outlook fit into this mess? There's even a handy summary table!
(EXC17) Exchange Virtualization -- As I confessed to my attendees, this session was a gamble that paid off. Back when I proposed the topic, there was no official statement of Microsoft support for Exchange virtualization (no, "Don't!" doesn't really count). I guessed that by the time November rolled around, Hyper-V would have finally shipped and they'd have shifted that stance -- and I was right. Because I focus more on the Hyper-V side of things, I invited VMWare to send a representative to the session to present their take on the subject. The resulting session was very good, and I learned a bunch of things too.
(EXC18) Exchange Protection using Data Protection Manager -- Although a lot of the content here was the same material that I've already presented this year (what, 4-5 times now?), I did have to make some changes thanks to the brilliant curve ball that Jason Buffington and his crew in the DPM team threw me. You see, Connections now has all Microsoft speakers speak on one day (imaginatively named "Microsoft Day" for some reason), and that day was Tuesday. While Jason couldn't be here, Karandeep Anand (who is the DPM bomb!) was -- and I've been trading decks and VMs and material back and forth with Jason and Karandeep for over a year now. Rather than give a less brilliant copy of the session Karandeep had already done, I added in some new material focusing on the internals of the Exchange store and how that affects Exchange protection, removed the demo, and really attacked the topic from the Exchange side of things. I think it worked. Either that or it was people staying to get free copies of the DPM book that my publisher thoughtfully provided.

A lot of my fellow speakers dread speaking on the last day, but I've found that I've come to enjoy it. Sure, you have smaller attendance numbers -- but the people who are there (especially if you get lucky enough to do the last session on the last day) are the people who really want to be there. I also encourage questions from the audience during the presentation, with the caveat that if they're too detailed or going to be answered later I'll defer them; I like the interactivity. I usually learn something from my attendees, which makes it a good time for everyone.

Back to the grind. I know I've been way too quiet on the blogfront lately, and I promise, I've got some fresh new content in the works. First, though, I have to catch up on the paying work. For some reason, my corporate overlords seem to expect me to do billable work too, not just speak and blog. Ah, well. At least I didn't get RickRolled on my birthday!

OCS follows Exchange into 64-bit-only land

Devin L. Ganger — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 20:07:05 GMT

You may have missed this interesting blog post this morning amidst all the political kerfuffle, so let me sum up: the next version of OCS will only support x64 platforms.

This isn't the big deal it would have been for OCS 2007. A lot of the initial FUD around the 64-bit-only move in Exchange 2007 turned out to be mere steam. While there were some initial challenges involved in managing the new 64-bit Exchange deployment from 32-bit machines, Microsoft got a lot of the licensing figured out and released the appropriate sets of tools to allow management of Exchange 2007 from both 32-bit and 64-bit environments. I fully expect that the OCS group has been paying close attention to all of this and taken good notes.

There's no denying that Exchange 2007 benefits from the "64-bit only in production" stance -- and with the release of Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V, not to mention Microsoft's updated support statement for virtualization environments, the need for 32-bit environments is going away. My biggest reason for wanting 32-bit Exchange environments was so I could run demos under Virtual Server; now that I have Hyper-V, I'm probably not in any rush to go back to Virtual Server and the 32-bit limitation. 64-bit hardware is the norm today, and the x64 Windows variants are solid and mainstream enough for my dedicated application servers. (Maybe not so for the desktop quite yet, but still getting there rapidly.)

The one thing I'm skeptical about, though, is whether the move to 64-bits is really going to reduce the total number of servers in the deployment. In Exchange 2007, I only saw the server reductions in very large environments; the mailbox-per-server gains we got from 64-bits was offset by the explicit breakout of roles and the business needs that drove redundant configurations like CCR (which meant no co-locating roles with the Mailbox role) and multiple HT/CAS servers. I'm wondering how this is going to play out with the next version of OCS, where it already has so many distinct roles in play.

What I *hope* to see is that the maximum capacity of each server role (such as the number of users per pool or the number of streams per mediation server) can be driven upwards; this makes the large datacenter configuration options much more attractive, because it does translate to a reduced number of servers. However, for organizations that still have relatively low bandwidth separating their various locations, 64-bits won't do much to help; OCS deployment planning is very dependent on bandwidth, and is often the top limit on scalability long before the limits of the 32-bit Windows environment.

Hyper-V in the hizzouse!

Devin L. Ganger — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 03:28:20 GMT

Everyone's being so coy in the Windows blogosphere today. "As you may have heard..." Heck with that; this is wicked cool. Hyper-V has Released To Manufacturing ... and is already available for download. As the link explains, it'll start coming down the Windows Update pipe July 8th. If you don't want your Windows Server 2008 machine to be updated yet, don't be blindly accepting updates.

Why wouldn't you want to get it first thing?

You're running a previous version of Hyper-V. If so, be aware that upgrading your VMs is not automatic. It's not a horrible process, but it will take some time. You have to manually export each VM, remove the VMs from the server, upgrade the server, re-import the VMs, then update the Integration Services. The more VMs you have, the more time this will take.
You're running some software that is not yet compatible with Hyper-V RTM but works with an earlier build. In this case, you want to wait until that software has a patch available.

I fit into both categories. I think I'm going to wait until I'm back from vacation to do it.

Oh, yes, just because Hyper-V is now RTM doesn't mean that you can go run to install Exchange 2007 on it in production. See Scott Schnoll's post for more info.

Hyper-V RC1 available

Devin L. Ganger — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 02:01:48 GMT

This is pretty cool -- I didn't even notice this at first! Hyper-V RC1 is now available for download through the Microsoft Download center or through Windows Update as an optional update. One of the nice changes here is that you now install the Hyper-V Integration Services on Windows 2008 guest machines the same way as any other operating system (before, you'd have to install the Hyper-V patch itself as a separate action).

That would be why my Windows Server 2008 machine wanted an extra reboot this afternoon...

Getting to know Hyper-V

Devin L. Ganger — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 08:48:31 GMT

Because of a fun new project I'm working on, I've been starting to get my hands dirty with Windows Server 2008 and the beta version of Hyper-V this week. So far, I'm impressed -- Microsoft has clearly put a lot of work into virtualization and this product appears to be much smoother than Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 (MSVS) or Virtual PC 2007 (VPC). Big wins include:

Better virtualization. Even when I was starting up a baseline Windows Server 2003 virtual machine to prepare it (strip off the old MSVS VM additions and install the corresponding Hyper-V Integration Services), the VM was very speedy and responsive. The host is a dual-core Athlon64 workstation with 8GB of RAM and two SATA hard drives (one for the OS, one for the virtual machine images). No metrics, but the bare VM booted and felt snappier than it did under MSVS.
Built-in snapshot facility that makes use of VSS. You can take snapshots of running VMs. I can't wait to see the DPM agent upgraded to provide Hyper-V support.
Better networking support. It's a lot less painful to get multiple networks and interfaces working properly, and by adding RRAS to the host OS you can get some sophisticated networking going. The VMs now support real Gigabit Ethernet speeds and it appears to support VLAN tagging, which will make a few folks happy.
MUCH better administrative UI than MSVS -- not that this is hard. I've never been a fan of web-based UI (unless they're built on AJAX, and even then, most of them are less than impressive). Going back to an MMC application is just fine with me.

However, there are still a few things that either haven't been adequately addressed or (worse) took an active step backwards from MSVS:

The best feature, bar none, of MSVS was the Virtual Machine Remote Console (VMRC). This little app was built on top of the same ActiveX control that the web-based console used, but had so much nice functionality built into it. For example, did you know that under VMRC, you had a virtual KVM switch -- just by pressing Host + Left or Host + Right, you could cycle through all of the VMs running on the currently connected host machine? I LOVED that feature; it kept my desk uncluttered when I was working with six VMs at a time, unless they were running on different hosts. The new Virtual Machine Connection application seems to be locked into a single VM-per-instance model, which sucks.
Speaking of the Virtual Machine Connection application, who named this? We already have the VMC (virtual machine configuration) acronym in use with Microsoft virtualization. This is just a pointless, confusing name change just for the sake of changing things.
And let's not forget that we've taken away the Host key -- to send Ctrl-Alt-Del to the guest VM, we have to type Ctrl-Alt-End, which neatly prevents that key mapping from being used on the machine running the client. At the very least, Microsoft, give us the option to use the old VMRC key behavior. Some of us liked it a lot.
There still seems to be no way to pass hardware on the host through to a guest VM. This is essential for full virtualization support -- being able to pass USB peripherals or SCSI controllers and chains through to VMs and have them appear as hardware in the guest VM would be VERY useful in a lot of situations. Without this capability, using Hyper-V for high-end enterprise virtualization is a joke. Heck, I can do this in Parallels on Mac OS X -- plug in a USB headset and it will ask you if it should be joined to the host Mac machine or the Windows guest VM. Hyper-V (and the eventual Virtual PC version that uses Hyper-V technology) should be able to do this too.

Flaws aside, Hyper-V looks like it's going to be a major step forward. This is good, as we use a lot of virtual machines here, so having a stable and easy-to-use VM solution is important for me.

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager is officially released

Devin L. Ganger — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 18:51:00 GMT

As recently posted on the Windows Virtualization Team blog, VMM has been released. This is big stuff, if you're using Microsoft Virtual Server in your environment. Here at 3Sharp, we spend quite a bit of time managing the various virtual machines we use, epsecially as we're cautiously edging into the realm of using virtual machines for production. There are definite advantages offered by virtualization, including Microsoft's licensing policy that allows you to run up to four virtual machines running Windows Server Enterprise Edition on a host that is running Enterprise Edition.

So, why should you get excited about VMM?

The pricing seems reasonable: $860 per managed MSVS host (not virtual machine) with VMM Enterprise Edition, $499 for the forthcoming Workgroup Edition that allows you to manage up to 5 physical hosts.
VMM is tightly integrated with other System Center products, including DPM. With DPM and VMM, you can do some wickedly cool disaster recovery scenarios, including recovery of physical production servers to virtual instances in a recovery site.
The eye-popper, for me: the roadmap for VMM includes the ability, in the next release, to mix and match virtualization environments such as VMWare, Xen, and Viridian. Yes, that's right, MS is committing to being able to manage non-MS virtualization environments from the same application. (I just wonder what they mean by next release: a service pack or an actual major release?)

Anyway, back to work. Sorry for the light blogging; Ryan and I are on the deathmarch to finish up the first draft of the DPM book, as the deadline is rapidly approaching. I've been trying to squeeze an hour or two here and there, though, to get some good Exchange blog posts worked up, and I've just about got some material ready to go.

Linux support, free price tag for Virtual Server 2005 R2

Devin L. Ganger — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 12:18:00 GMT

A few people out there are shocked by this:

Market Bulletin: Microsoft Announces New Price, and Availability of Linux Support, for Virtual Server 2005 R2
Published: April 3, 2006
Today Microsoft announced that Virtual Server 2005 R2 is now available as a free download. This also will apply to the forthcoming service pack 1 of Virtual Server 2005 R2. In addition, Microsoft announced the availability of virtual machine add-ins for Linux and a technical product support model for Linux guest operating systems running on Virtual Server 2005 R2.

I don't know why there is this level of surprise. It makes perfect sense to me. So which flavors of Linux are supported?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 (update 6)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (update 6)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
Red Hat Linux 7.3
Red Hat Linux 9.0
Novell’s SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9
Novell’s SuSE Linux 9.2
Novell’s SuSE Linux 9.3
Novell’s SuSE Linux 10.0

The VM additions for Linux guests (available for free download) provide the following capabilities, bringing them closer to parity with Windows guest VMs:

Guest and Host synchronization for time sync, heartbeat, and coordinated shutdown
Mouse and display driver function
SCSI disk emulation

One final juicy tidbit:

As previously announced, Virtual Server 2005 R2 service pack 1 is scheduled for a beta release in Q2 and general availability in early 2007. This service pack will support the hardware virtualization capabilities developed by AMD and Intel. By supporting both AMD Virtualization and Intel Virtualization Technology, customers will be provided better interoperability, strengthened isolation designed to help prevent corruption of one virtual machine from affecting others on the same system, and improved performance for non-Windows guest operating systems. The service pack will also support Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service, providing better support for backup and disaster recovery. Finally, this service pack will provide existing Microsoft Virtual Server customers an important transition to the Windows hypervisor, which will be delivered in the Windows Server "Longhorn" wave.

This is going to make life a lot easier for a lot of folks.